Show Notes
Transcript
[00:00] Rob: This is Startups For The Rest of Us: Episode 79.
[00:03] [music]
[00:11] Rob: Welcome to Startups For The Rest Of Us, the podcast to help developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching the Startups whether you built your first one or you’re just thinking about it. I’m Rob.
[00:20] Mike: And I’m Mike.
[00:20] Rob: And we’re here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made. It’s MicroConf day. What’s the word this week, Mike?
[00:29] Mike: Beer makes you smarter. [Laughter]
[00:30] Rob: Wait, what? I’m confused.
[00:32] Mike: I’ve saw this article and it basically said that beer makes you smarter. And it was based on — pretty sure it was a formal study from the University of Illinois in Chicago. And they basically took 40 participants and took 20 of them and gave them a couple of beers before putting them in to this game and then challenge them to — they’ve give them three words and a series and then they would challenge them to name a forth word. And the people who had a couple of beers were dramatically better at naming that forth word than the people who hadn’t.
[01:03] Rob: Right. So, it doesn’t actually make you smarter. It makes you better at this very specific task.
[01:08 ] Mike: Yeah, it — and they actually thought that it had a lot to do with coming up with ideas. If you have a couple of drinks then and there’s something about the way that, you know, the chemicals react within your brain that make you better at problem solving. I saw a variation of this particular article someplace else that had some different theories on it. So there was nothing actually concrete on it and I’m sure that it would take much more studies which I would be more than happy to part take in. But —
[01:33] Rob: Me — [Laughter] This fall off — this falls in line with something I’ve read years ago and something I’ve done quite a bit is when I want to sit down and do writing and I really want to get a lot done in 10 in the evenings especially, I will have a glass — one to two glasses of red wine to help me do the first draft and just get it out unedited and then when I revised, I will tend to want to be more empt and really in to the material more detail-oriented. And that’s when I do like a cup of coffee or some kind of caffeine [0:02:00]. And I read years ago that it’s like one glass of red wine to write, one glass of coffee or a cup of coffee to revise. And now I’m seeing other people, I think Tim Ferriss was on the TV show the other day called A Day In The Life on Hulu. And he does the same thing. He’s basically like I have one to two glasses of red wine in the evening right before I start my writing. And I thought it was, that covers this I mean this fits in to that, right? It’s the whole creativity and kind of left brain versus right brain like activating certain censors. I’m sure it’s what it does.
[02:26] Mike: Yeah. I’ve found that I’ve been able to like if I have a couple of beers, I’ll be sitting and writing code and stuff. And I’ll be — I haven’t measured it but I feel like I’m a lot more productive could be just the beer talk. [Laughter]
[02:37] Rob: Right.
[02:38] [music]
[02:41] Mike: As you were saying, today is MicroConf. What’s the — what’s the word on your — your end?
[02:44] Rob: Today is MicroConf. We obviously recorded a week earlier but actually it’s going live on the day that the MicroConf is happening. So hopefully, we’re having fun right now and everything is going well. There may be a week off next week and then the week after, we’ll come back with our — our MicroConf wrap up episode. And I also wanted to give a shout out to Steve at digitaltoolfactory.net and actually a thanks because he talked about one of our episodes and he basically said I love the title, “Startups for the Rest of Us has the greatest quote ever on entrepreneurship”. [Laughter] And the quote was from a couple of episodes ago and it was the “Employees complain entrepreneurs to get it done”. So that was cool. Thanks for quoting us there, Steve.
[03:20] And then the other thing, there were several comments on episodes 77 and 78. These are on the actual blog sites startupsfortherestofus.com. And Justin Jackson said a couple of things based on we were talking about forums and CRM Software and such. And he — he reminded us that Basecamp isn’t CRM Software. It’s Highrise with the CRM Software. Basecamp is Project Management. So, we just misspoke there. And then the other thing he said is that we’re making assumptions about visiting a competitor who is an — who has an outdated website. He said that they just updated their site, which they haven’t really touched since 2004. What were they doing? Serving customers. “Our business was growing so fast from referrals.” They literally didn’t have time to update it. So they’re at industrymailout.com.
[04:05] And I have — I have some thoughts on that because I still think — I think it depends on whether your market is online or offline —
[04:11] Mike: Right.
[04:11] Rob: As other — you can tell, you know, if that business is really hitting it and whether you can out market them online. If their site really is old and they’re growing by referral, that’s good for them. But if — if there is demand online and they’re not going after it, I do still think that what you said which was, you know, old sites can be an indicator that they’ve kind of check out their online marketing and I think there could be room for you.
[04:32] Mike: Yeah and again, I mean that list that we talked about was just things that you can look at. I mean, not any single one of them is going to be concrete proof that you’re going to be able to evaluate them effectively. I mean you really have to combine a bunch of different things before you can come to those decisions. But again, it goes back to beating them online and if their site hasn’t been updated, it doesn’t matter how well they’re doing offline, you know, the fact is you should be able to beat them with the online marketing. But — I mean he does bring up a very valid point that if they’re doing great business offline, then it probably doesn’t take much more than a site redesign for them to kind of bump themselves up in the search engine rankings especially if they’ve had a site for a while.
[05:10] Rob: Yeah. So thanks, Justin for that comment. We appreciate everyone who’s — who’s participating whether they’re e-mailing us at questions@startupsfortherestofus.com, calling in to our voicemail number at 888-801-9690 or posting to the blog.
[05:25] Mike: Are you front loading that stuff now?
[05:27] Rob: I —
[05:27] Mike: [Laughter]
[05:28] Rob: It’s a one final comment. This was on episode 78 and it was by Mark Stephens. This was the episode titled Things You Should Give Up. And he said, “One thing I would add to your list of things to give-up (especially for startups) is to give up the need for everything to be perfect. Some things just need to be okay and you can then focus your efforts for perfection where it matters. Geoffrey Moore did a brilliant talk on this a few years ago at Business of Software.”
[05:50] Mike: That’s a fantastic point. [Laughter]
[05:52] Rob: I know. I know this.
[05:52] Mike: Really, really is.
[05:53] Rob: That’s a good one. Yeah, we should’ve maybe if we had time we could added a few more to the list but I second that thought.
[06:00] [music]
[06:02] Mike: Today we’re going to be talking about the top five reasons that your business fail. When you talk about Startups, the issues of success and failure tend to come up. And what we’re going to be focusing today on is business failure rather than product failure. There’s nothing inherently wrong with your product idea failing but when the business itself fails, there’s fundamental flaws in the execution of the business and the business going after or certain products.
[06:26] So, that’s kind of the — just to what we’re trying to get at today is that there’s differences between product failure and business failure. And we’re focusing today on business failure.
[06:34] Rob: Are you — are you talking about like if a business has multiple products that one of them can fail or you’re talking about just a single product not working, doesn’t mean that your business fails, you can launch another one?
[06:45] Mike: Yeah, sort of. So if you have — if you start a business and you start pursuing a product and that product fails for whatever reason, you can pivot and go to a new product or you can launch a variation of that product or a completely new product. And your business hasn’t failed but the product has but that’s okay. I mean, building and launching product is kind of a process that you have to go through and some products are going to do well and some of them aren’t. But you obviously want to minimize the product failures as much as possible because that minimizes the amount of time that you have to, I guess meander through business trying to figure out which products are going to do well in keeping business and which ones aren’t.
[07:22] But if you have fundamental flaws in your business and in the execution of the plans for those different products, then you’re going to have much more serious issues and it doesn’t matter what products you have. Then you’re eventually going to fail because the business itself fails. It’s not necessarily the product failing.
[07:39] Rob: Yeah, let’s dive in.
[07:40] Mike: The first reason that businesses will fail is because you don’t actually get started. And this one I think a lot of people fall in to this. Too many people spend too much time building up the idea of a business rather than actually building the business itself. And we talked about some of these things back in episode 71 where we talked about all the different things that you shouldn’t pay for early on in the business. And by doing all of those things instead of trying to build the business and build the products that you need to launch, then you’re never actually building the business itself.
[08:10] Rob: Yeah, this reminds me — I published a post a couple of years ago now probably and it was called Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders or something. And one of the traits that I listed was how quickly do you respond to opportunity. And I feel like that has a lot to do with people who I’ve seen succeed, right? It’s — there’s a difference between sitting with a notebook and making list of 10, 20, 50 business ideas over the course of many years which I used to do and I think a lot of wannabe founders are guilty of doing. And I don’t say wannabe in the native way, I really just mean people who want to start companies. I think that it’s more about, you know, having a bunch of ideas and really thinking them through too far before you actually just start putting some feet on the ground and you start talking to customers and get an idea of people want to do it.
[08:57] I’m actually, you know, in typical entrepreneur fashion, I have my notebook and even in the last week I’ve been adding new business ideas, new product ideas to it as I’ve read a few essays that have got me thinking and already I’m looking at them and saying what can I do this week or next maybe after MicroConf that can give me an idea of whether or not this will succeed without me mauling them over for six months like I used to like. Over analysis is just — it’s so painful and it’s so, so common I think with a lot of us.
[09:27] Mike: It’s something else that goes along with that that you didn’t directly mentioned was if I need too much time trying to think of the perfect idea because it’s going to be really difficult to find the perfect idea these days. I mean you’ve mentioned it another of times on previous podcast where the best time you started business was five years ago and then the next best time was four years ago. I mean, you really — you’d just need to get started and if you’re not getting started, then you never going to get anywhere.
[09:51] So, number two on the list is giving up too early. This is the almost the opposite of not getting started. It’s just giving up way too early. When you run in the hard times, you basically have two options. You have to either give up or you push through. And it’s a lot easier to give up than to push through as hard times.
[10:07] Rob: This is a very tough question to answer of whether or not you should give up or push through when you hit a road block. And I’ve actually been having conversations with a few different entrepreneurs over the past couple of months, the guys who were just getting started. They’re early in idea phase. Some of them had written code launch and then got their initial customer base and realized that they needed to pivot. Basically that it wasn’t a viable business even though you had a market research show that it was. There’s obviously a lot of uncertainty but I would say that there’s a lot of art in there being entrepreneur. But others are still in the idea phase and the question that comes up most often is when should I dump this idea. There’s no answer, right? I mean it depends. There’s no one answer.
[10:48] The biggest realization that I’ve had as I’ve talked to these guys is that sitting there, having them go often do some research, pound up the numbers, give it some thought, talk to some customers and then come back to me and have a conversation. For me to then try to get to the meat of the question has worked out really well. And the reason is because the person doing, the entrepreneur doing the research is too close to the problem. They can’t actually see the forest for the trees and I’m removed enough from it. I haven’t done all the research. I haven’t spend only hours in it but then I’m basically able to ask of these the key questions and we can sit there together and obviously not making the decisions for these guys but to kind of push them in the direction of doing some more research or maybe think about when they are really passionate about the idea. And almost — there’s almost never a yes or no. It’s almost always comes down to if you’re really passionate about this and you really think it can succeed, then even though some of the signs are saying no, you should do it.
[11:44] And then on the flip side, there are even some minor road blocks here and you just kind of aren’t that interested in the idea? Maybe if you found out that the idea is viable and there is a market for it but it’s going to require a lot of say cold calling or in person sale and you’ve just not or not sure you want to do that, then maybe even though it could [0:12:00] be a viable business, maybe you should think about not doing it. And that’s typically where it winds up, right? It winds up being a personal choice because it’s almost never a yes or no. It’s more option than not a weighing of different positive and negative factors. And getting that list of positive and negative factors on to a piece of paper is challenging but I really recommend the two-person approach that would kind of stumbled upon here in the past few months.
[12:23] Mike: And just to be clear of what you’ve said so far is completely focused on giving up or not as opposed to taking the product and pivoting, right?
[12:31] Rob: Yeah, that’s right. So that’s also been part of the conversation. These days, I would never — almost never tell an entrepreneur to totally give up not unless you really don’t want to be a founder anymore. To me, that’s — that’s when you give up but almost — in almost all cases, it’s been pivoting the thing. And even, you know, one guy like pivoted from something to help with documentation and he was almost pivoting, going to pivot like in to a completely different vertical but there was at least some code base he was going to reuse and there was some knowledge that he had learned about how businesses make purchasing decisions that he had learned by talking through some initial prospects and the couple of customers that they did purchased from them. So, it’s really — I guess I’ve heard the phrase like a pivot is just, you know, a switch to another product idea and a leap I think is when you really probably keep the same company shell but you just almost revamp the product entirely, maybe moving in to a completely different product.
[13:19] So, I think if we say that giving up is doing a leap or doing a pivot, then — then that’s what more of what I’ve been talking about. I haven’t been telling anyone to give up being a founder.
[13:27] Mike: The number three on this list was being unable to pivot. But again going back to the original topic for this particular podcast, it was giving up too early on a business, not necessarily on the products because products, you can — you can obviously give up on a product because as you said it just doesn’t appeal to you anymore. But if business itself and running the business doesn’t appeal to you anymore, then that’s, I would say a much more serious fundamental issue than just not being interested in the product.
[13:54] Rob: Yeah, this actually relates back to another one I’ve post Lesser Known Traits of Successful Founders that I’ve mentioned and it’s how flexible are you. You know, if you’re married to a product idea or business idea and you’ve been following it for — in your head for years, it’s hard to let it go. You become married to it and that’s a real dangerous especially with how quickly things move these days. And so having the flexibility to just say I’ve built this awesome, you know, whatever it is a CMS or invoicing software and it’s totally not working out in this vertical and I’m just going to switch and I’m going to now do it for mortgage brokers. To be able to do that, if it’s the right business decision, it can be a real indicator of whether or not you’re going to succeed as a founder.
[14:33] I think every startups story that you read involves several adjustments to the vision. And even though you read and you think oh PayPal and Netflix and all these companies that achieved big success where with that from the start Facebook is the same way. When you really read the story and you get in to it and you heard the founders talking about it, they almost all started as pretty different ideas then they’ve eventually round up and the founders were smart enough to noticed that they needed to change course and they had the flexibility and the willingness to perhaps give a part of their initial vision or all of their initial vision when they realized that, you know, another part of the business was essentially taking off.
[15:11] Mike: So number four on the list is you don’t make the business a priority. And I think this trap is really easy to fall in to for a lot of people especially when you’re first getting started because you always have time down the road and if you keep telling yourself that there will be time later, I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it and you don’t make time for the business if you don’t make the business itself a priority for yourself, it just never going to happen. I mean, you really need to buckle down and execute on things because that’s insanely important for being successful.
[15:39] Rob: And I think the big question that, you know, you should ask yourself if you can start to this, “Can you focus long enough to deliver? Are you focusing on the business or are you letting other things become a priority?” We talked about in the past about how it’s really fun to watch TV and go hang out with friends at Happy Hour but those friends typically aren’t the ones that are starting a business on the side and so, if you have a 9 to 5 and you want to start a business and you want to go out every night, something has to give.
[16:04] The other thing I’m seeing is the phase of innovation and the phase of how fast things are moving, it feels to me like it’s accelerating even more. Even in boring niches where there was no competition 5, 7 years ago. They’re starting to be some competition and then as you edge in to even minorly interesting niches, there’s a lot more competition and that was a couple of years ago. And then as you get into the bay hot tech areas, you look at things like Pinterest or any type of Facebook or location-based mobile apps, all that stuff.
[16:35] Like if you wait 30 days, the landscape has changed substantially enough but if you have not acted quickly and gotten something out, you may have miss the boat. It’s that fast like it’s a matter of months before the really hot niches are changing and we don’t necessarily recommend getting in to the hot niches because they do change so fast and they tend to have people working 24/7 on a move, raise funding and all kinds of stuff. But as I said, this trickles all the way down and even in the medium to low interest niches that aren’t that sexy, they’re changing so fast that you really need to think about how quickly you can move and get to market these days.
[17:09] Mike: And the last reason your business will fail is because you aren’t building processes for your business. This goes back more to making sure that you’re building things that can be repeated. You know, you need to build a business process for handling whatever it is that it can be handed off to somebody else to be repeated and that comes to just about anything whether it’s your sales process, your funnels, the code itself, I mean what you’re trying to do when you’re building your business is build processes that can be followed that can later be skilled and by skilled I mean either hand them off to somebody else so that one other person does them or you handed it off to a computer. But then you take those things and you can essentially off load them from yourselves so you can concentrate on other things.
[17:51] Rob: Have you heard the term “Earn out”?
[17:53] Mike: I have heard the term, I don’t recall specifically what it is.
[17:56] Rob: So an earn out is if you sell your business and the acquiring company makes you stick around for what’s called an earn out.
[18:04] Mike: Oh yes. Yup.
[18:05] Rob: So you get some of the money upfront and then if you stick around for two years, you get another big check or one year, you know, whatever the term they decided. And I was actually talking to a founder whose business got acquired probably about a year ago now. I was just e-mailing with him this week and he said that they had so many processes in place and so much of the stuff was — I won’t say automated but it was basically documented and enough was automated that he was able to walk away with the holy grill of acquisitions which is where you get your money and you walk away the day of the sale closes. That’s very rare.
[18:38] The thing is these processes, they don’t just make your life easier while you’re running your business. They actually make you way more attractive to an acquiring company if you ever want to sell it and it will basically increase your revenue, your income per hour work. Because the more you automate, the less you have to work in your business and the more you can really, you know, work on your businesses as Michael Gerber says.
[19:00] There is the book called Built To Sell. It’s called as like a parable, like just a story of this guy who’s selling his business and when I first started listening to it, I kind of groaned like this is going to be terribly cheesy but it turns out by the end I was really rooting for the guy in the story. The author covers things that you should do if you ever plan on selling your business and how to make it more saleable and talks about getting repeatable processes and getting paid in advance and having recurring revenue and being specialized and just some things like that.
[19:25] It’s pretty sure a book. It’s worth to read but the most important thing I took away from it is even if I don’t want to sell my businesses, all of the things he says in there are ways to make your business more efficient and just make it a better business for you to run. So that you can spend your time doing things that are more interesting to you that could include maybe potentially, you know, starting launching other product line or doing something else that is fun. I mean as entrepreneurs we’re creators and we want to do the new stuff and so, you don’t want to sit there day to day doing things that you could essentially just processes for and hand off to other people peacefully.
[19:56] Mike: Yeah and everything that you said was kind of a whole point of that is, you know, if you’re putting these processes in place, then those processes can – they can be followed by you but they could be followed by somebody else or by one or more people that just scale out and help make your business that much more profitable so you’re working, as you said, on your business as supposed to in it.
[20:16] Rob: So, hey Mike. I want to add one other. I know we said top 5 reasons but one occurred to me as we were talking. And it’s one – we definitely covered this before because it’s more of a psychological or mind set one. But the question I throw out is do you have confidence in your ability to execute? The question is not “Can you execute?” Because I believe most people can execute on ideas and most people can eventually be successful if they work hard enough at it and trying of ideas that will eventually happen.
[20:42] The question is do you have confidence in your ability to execute? Do you really believe that you can do this? And are you going to stick around after the first 6-month low, you know, where your sales drop, do you believe that you can correct that? Because if you don’t, then the odds are that you are going to do number two which was give up too early because the less confidence you have in your ability to execute, then the more likelier are going to be to basically close up shop.
[21:07] Mike: Yeah, I found there were things that I’m either not interested in doing or that I feel like I don’t have the ability or knowledge to do it. I tend to procrastinate with those things and put them off in a way that’s not much different than just giving up. I mean, it’s amazing how little time that it actually takes once I’ve made those decisions to buckle down and do it. There was something I was trying to get through, I don’t know, maybe 3 or 4 weeks ago and I kept putting it off and putting it off and then finally I just said “Look, I got to get this done.” And I just sat down and did it and it took me like two hours to do.
[21:39] Rob: Yeah. Have those all the time and so frustrating. It is crazy, huh, when you’re gifted at something or when you’re skilled at it like writing code, I think that’s why we all fallen to the developer’s trap of I can write codes so I’m going to go build the product because that’s what I know had to do whereas the marketing staff talking to customers, market research, whatever, you know, all these other things are going to building the product that may in fact be more involved with the success of the product than the actual code you’re going to write. We ignore that because we procrastinate.
[22:06] I think we do it on purpose as much as just maybe not having confidence in our ability to execute on these things or feeling like you’re wasting time because learning is time consuming. I mean if you go out and start doing talking to customers and you’re not very good at it, you almost feel like “Oh, I’m just wasting my time. I could be back home, you know, just writing tens of thousands of lines of code.” It’s so much more efficient but I mean as we know, it’s like yeah, it’s efficient unless you’re building something no one wants and the way to find out if they want it is by talking to those customers.
[22:34] Mike: You know, that’s one of the challenges that you kind of have to overcome is just buckling down and working through those tough times or do you have confidence in your abilities actually execute on those things.
[22:44] Rob: I think what’s interesting is you don’t necessarily have to have like the utmost confidence and I am a brilliant marketer if you’ve never done it, you know, or I am great at customer development if you’ve never done it. But you have a confidence in your ability to go over on those things.
[22:56] Mike: I almost want to say that even comes to that, I would almost say that it comes down to your ability and willingness to go out on the limb and actually making attempt and if you’re making an attempt then chances are good that you’re probably doing more than the guy next to you.
[23:12] Rob: Yeah right. When you’re reading Hacker News articles, it is probably equivalent to two weeks of actually launching a startup. Right? I mean I’m making up numbers —
[23:21] Mike: [Laughter]
[23:22] Rob: … a little bit of something like that, it’s like a 100 to 1 ratio of the amount of progress and learning and understanding you will achieve by actually doing it and failing than you would by just reading about other people doing it and failing.
[23:35] Mike: Or just being mediocre at them and you don’t even have to be the best in the world at it as long as you’re actually trying it and that you are making progress. I mean, that’s the important thing as you’re making progress towards those things.
[23:46] Rob: Yeah and if you look back at anyone’s story, yours and mine included, I had a number, I think yeah, I never actually set the timeline out until I was on Mixergy a couple of months ago but it was like I had five or six failed ideas that I actually launched. I had ten more that I met, you know, [0:24:00] never been satellite the day that I had mentioned but I had a number that I spent months and months building and then launch and they failed before I have my first success. And you even look at these gaming companies that have sold for hundreds of millions recently but bottom line is like OMGPOP which is sold for a hundred something million. They had nothing in the bank like the dude had just laid off a half of his staff and he add $1800 in the bank and they had been around for six years and had 15 failed games and then this one was the fastest growing iPhone app ever in terms of downloads.
[24:31] Now, that’s hitting the startup lottery in a way and getting acquired but the bottom line is if you didn’t have skin in the game and if you didn’t keep coming back at it and have some failures, you know, that wouldn’t have happened. And the same thing with Rovio. Rovio had over or at least 15 games in mobile games and that kind of stuff. And by all accounts, they were not doing that well before Angry Birds and then Angry Birds is, you know, it’s basically a multi-billion dollar franchising now. They’re doing a TV show, they’re doing a movie based on Angry Birds, all the licensing. My kid has gummy Angry Birds that he bought at the Candies. I mean, they’re going all out on this thing and again, I’m not saying “Oh, do this and you will have a billion dollars because that’s not the goal. The realization is these guys failed a lot just like all of us have. Very, very few entrepreneurs come out of the gate and — and hit it big their first time. Every entrepreneur I talked to has had failed ideas before they succeed.
[25:23] Mike: Yeah, and even if you look at the — I don’t want to set a gold standard of, you know, entrepreneurs, you know, a lot of the high profile bloggers that you probably write over the years Fog Creek at Joel Spolsky at their home. What was one of their first projects [Phonetic] is I think CityDesk I believe.
[25:38] Rob: CityDesk, yup but it was like a CMS.
[25:39] Mike: Yeah. And that thing failed. I ended buying it at one point because I wanted to see what it was like and you know, started using it for my blog for wall and I was just like “Yeah, there’s just some contents that’s not working out the way that I want it to.” But, you know, that’s one of those examples where you look at somebody like him and say “Well, you know, he’s done all these things over the years. How could he possibly gone wrong? He worked at Microsoft and …” But that right there was one of those failures that, you know, nobody talks about and I think it’s important to realize that everyone has those failures. It’s just a matter of how you react to them.
[26:09] [music]
[26:13] Mike: So I think that about wrap us up. Our theme music is an excerpt from “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt, used under Creative Commons.
[26:19] Rob: Hey, did you know there’s a live version of “We’re Outta Control” by MoOt on Youtube?
[26:23] Mike: I did not.
[26:24] Rob: We should totally look it up, yeah, I’ve been seen it on Twitters and people were like they were mentioning that there’s a live version of “We’re Outta Control” on Spotify. I went on Youtube and search for it and they’re performing it live like it’s kind of cool to hear it. Of course I listened to the verse because we never actually play that part. Yeah, so we’ll link it up on the show now and so people can just search Youtube for MoOt “We’re Outta Control” to see that video.
[26:43] Mike: And you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes by searching for Startups or via RSS at StartupsfortheRestofUs.com. Thanks for listening. We’ll see you next time.
They are a pretty cool band 😀
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K11jb01KTOQ
Here’s the 5 reasons, mostly for my own future reference!
1. The first reason that businesses will fail is because you don’t actually get started.
2. …number two on the list is giving up too early.
3. …number three on this list was being unable to pivot.
4. …number four on the list is you don’t make the business a priority.
5. …And the last reason your business will fail is because you aren’t building processes for your business.